Feminists and human rights advocates have engaged with human rights
law with a faith in its ability to promote gender equality and provide
an important impetus to nation-states and domestic jurisdictions to
address gender injustice and inequality. Drawing on the extensive
scholarship that already exists exposing how the international legal
regime and human rights remain androcentric and exclusive, I further
interrogate the faith that continues to inform human rights
scholarship and advocacy in relation to gender equality.  I argue that
such faith obscures the gender and cultural assumptions on which the
right to gender equality is based.  My argument puts into crisis the
idea that gender equality is always and invariably a progressive and
emancipatory project for all women that can be realized through the
achievement of full civilizational maturity and removal of what are
deemed as barbaric or backward cultural practices. Rather, I expose
how the right to equality is a discursive terrain where competing
understandings about gender and culture are produced.  Instead of
casting the resistance to gender equality in terms of cultural or
religious opposition, I examine how the right itself is a tool of
governance and surveillance. I move beyond a mere concern over the
legitimacy of a cultural practice, such as the veil, to a focus on the
need to engage with the deeper discursive and normative concerns that
shape and structure the right to gender equality.  I argue that
majoritarianism as well as essentialist assumptions about gender and
culture operate in and through the right to gender equality,
illustrating my argument through a discussion on the rights of Muslim
women in postcolonial India in the context of the emergence and
forceful advocacy of the Hindu Right.